
Leslie Marr
Still Life with Flowers, Chuggaton, 1963-64
Oil on canvas
91.5 x 71 cm
36 1/8 x 28 in
36 1/8 x 28 in
Returning from his sojourn in the south of France, in the autumn of 1963, Marr discovered
the art of Chaïm Soutine. A major exhibition of the French artist’s work was organised by
the Arts Council and staged at Tate from September to November that year. Soutine was
already a name known to him, but Marr was ‘bowled over by the paintings’, which would
radically reshape his landscape and still life work in the years that followed.
The impact of works such as Soutine’s Jug with Lilacs (1920, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis
University) exhibited at the Arts Council show is immediately visible in Still Life with Flowers
made in the winter of 1963-1964. Frenetic, churning energy overpowers any search for
structural massing in the composition. Marr’s joy in the gestural rendering of individual
petals is evident. Thinly-applied smears constitute an indistinct background and press
the flowers themselves to the fore, forming zones that sit in and out of focus, suggesting
Marr’s eye was guided by his recent experience as a photographer. The substantial scale
of this work demonstrates Marr’s now confident, mature approach to still life. Having
recently moved into his new home at Higher Chuggaton in Devon, in subsequent years
he would become a studio potter apprenticed to Martin Leach, son of the famous St Ives
potter Bernard Leach. Through the scale and passion contained in Marr’s vision in Still Life
with Flowers, we are given a premonition of his sensitivity to the drama and vibrancy of the
domestic space that allowed him to apply his talents to pottery with success.
Marr was aware of and responsive to Bomberg’s still lifes made in 1943 [cat. 9], which sit
alongside the wartime abstraction of Ivon Hitchens’ still life and landscapes. Marr’s Still
Life with Flowers participates in these connections but ultimately looks elsewhere. In the
context of Marr’s career, the work’s photographic isolation of its subject – to the extent
that it carries a mood of penetration and revelation – is an independent construct. Through
what is contained within that revelation – a dynamic, metamorphic and freshly-Soutinian
vision of nature – it is a personal transcription of what Marr saw as most valuable in the
work of the modern French master at Tate.
Provenance
Artist's CollectionExhibitions
2006, London, Piano Nobile, Leslie Marr: Into the 21st Century2007, Newcastle, Northumbria University Gallery, Leslie Marr Retrospective, November-December
2012, London, Piano Nobile, Leslie Marr at 90
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